Forty Acres is the back lot of Selznick Studios in Culver City. Until
the night of Dec. 11, 1938 it was cluttered with old sets accumulated
during 20 years of movie making. These sets were laboriously filled
with waste and other inflammable materials, well soaked with kerosene.
As darkness fell, the $26,000 bonfire roared sky-high while seven
Technicolor cameras ground away. The first scenes of Gone With the Wind
had been shot. A flat representing the Atlanta warehouse district was
constructed in front of the old sets. In the light of the dying flames
Myron Selznick, Hollywood's No. 1 agent, stepped over to his brother.
With him was his British client, wasp-waisted, tilt-browed, hazel-eyed
Cinemactress Vivien Leigh (pronounced Lee), who had slipped into
Hollywood allegedly to see Laurence Olivier. Said Myron Selznick to
David Selznick: "Dave, I want you to meet Scarlett O'Hara."

So after two years, four months of nationwide search and tension,
dashing Georgia Belle Scarlett O'Hara was a wispish little English girl
with a neatly clipped British accent. Born in Darjeeling, India, in the
Himalaya Mountains, Nov. 5, 1913, she spent the first five years of her
life in Calcutta, about which she remembers nothing. Later she attended
convent school near London with Cinemactress Maureen O'Sullivan. Still
later Vivien Leigh studied dramatics. Married in 1932 to Barrister
Leigh Holman (whose first name plus her own first name she uses for a
stage name), she has a little girl. After The Mask of Virtue, in which,
says Cinemactress Leigh, "I played a tart," she had small parts in Fire
Over England,

Dark Journey, A Yank At Oxford. While playing in The First TimeThe
Last, she met Laurence Olivier, to whom, when both receive their
divorces, she will be married.

"Their love," says a friend, "is the most beautiful thing I have ever
known." Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier spend most of their time
together, are seldom seen at Hollywood night clubs, both like reading
(she prefers biographies, thought David Cecil': The Young Melbourne
"wonderfully good"). Olivier sings a few songs that Vivien Leigh knows
how to pick out c i the piano. In their repertory: The Melody in F,
Banjo on My Knee, My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean.

Though professional Anglophobes squawked at the choice of an English
girl to play Scarlett O'Hara and a chapter of the United Daughters of
the Confederacy at Ocala, Fla. protested, most Southerners were
relieved. Their real fear was that a damyankee girl might be given the
part.

The choice of Vivien Leigh was not altogether a surprise to Vivien
Leigh. British Director Victor Saville, now in Hollywood, read one of
the first copies of Gone With the Wind to reach England. As soon as he
had finished it, he rushed to the telephone and mischievously called
Vivien Leigh. Said he: "Vivien, I've just read a great story for the
movies about the bitchiest of all bitches, and you're just the person
to play the part."

The Women. On Jan. 26, 1939, Cukor began directing with a very
incomplete script. Trouble started at once. Selznick was not satisfied
with the results which Cukor, a specialist in intimate scenes,
especially with women, was getting. Selznick felt that Cukor did not
get the "big feel" of Gone With the Wind and worked too slowly.